Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (3)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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25 September 2011

* Contains spoilers *

To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.

As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).

So the mirror-image, of the game being played transposed into a clockwise motion, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...)

And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left.

(It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.)

So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...

Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (really Lewis Carroll, or vice versa)? The poorer for it, I think.


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Miss Wyoming comes to Britain

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 September

I was not really of an age to have known about Joy(ce) McKinney at the time that she rose to prominence, but, as the former Mormon who was used in the documentary Tabloid to explain various things remarked, what she said was one thing, what the Mormons said was another, and maybe what actually happened fell in the middle somewhere. Still, by escaping from the country and home, via Canada, she and her friend and accomplice Keith made fools of the British authorities (which perhaps explains why no application was made for their extradition).

Be that as it may, it is a curiosity of this subject that The Daily Mirror says that (as a result of what happened to Mirror Group Newspapers) it no longer has much of the evidence showing that she performed sexual services (although not intercourse) for money before meeting her ideal man, and that Joy herself says that a large amount of original material that proved the contrary was stolen from a vehicle of hers. She states that the material that the Mirror used at the time was faked, whereas its photographer says that he saw the negatives and prints, and the magazines in which the images appeared.

Altogether intriguing (and entertainingly, sometimes quite irreverently, presented), though nothing was as significant, for me, as the account of the cloning in South Korea of five puppies, all with sub-names from their beloved ‘parent’ Booger, and courtesy of some tissue from his stomach when he died. The practitioner who had performed the procedure said that he wasn’t playing God, because he wasn’t creating life – well, you could have fooled me, if that’s not what those Booger replicas were…!


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